Staff MemberPremium Member

The Archos G9 Android Honeycomb tablet will be available for pre-order on September 20th, and the tab is expected to arrive for retail in October. As a refresher, this Honeycomb tablet is the first to come with a giant 250GB Hard Drive.

For some that is a huge boon, but keep in mind for the HD to be that size and still be affordable in a tablet, it would have to be a regular platter based physical HD. As long as you are careful with the tab you should be fine; however, regular hard drives are prone to sector damage from shock and vibration, whereas the smaller SSD 16GB and 32GB varieties arriving in traditional tablets are not. Here's a quote from the SlashGear article with details on Archos' different versions,

The Archos 101 G9 tablet will come in two versions with a 16GB version that sells for $399. The 250GB version of that tablet will sell for $469. The Archos 80 G9 with 16GB will sell for $329 and the 250GB version will sell for $369. The 250GB version of each model use a HDD inside and the other version uses flash storage. There will be a third version of the Archos 80 G9 with 8GB of storage and a 1GHz processor for $299 that will be in stores on September 30.

The tablets all use a 1GHz Arm Cortex A9 dual core processor. There will also be a Turbo version with the OMAP 4 dual-core processor at 1.5GHz.

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These seem like pretty competitive prices. Once they are released it will be interesting to see if the quality is good or matches the price.

To recap: my personal view (obviously ymmv) is if it's Archos -> stay away. I once had a perfect 605 media player that worked beautifully. But I've read dozens and dozens and dozens of reviews by miserable owners -- mainly dealing with Archos customer service, and probably more importantly, promised features on units that never materialize. If it's a tablet you're looking for, I'd really recommend sticking with a "mainstream" manufacturer and avoiding the smaller guys.